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Americans aged over 65 stand an 8% chance of being prescribed inappropriate drugs when they visit their doctor's surgery or a hospital outpatient department, a similar rate to that in 1995, a new study has found.

The risk is twice as high for women and may be worse among patients in nursing homes, and the finding probably underestimates the problem, the study's author, Dr Margie Rauch Goulding, a healthstatistician at the National Center for Health Statistics, told the BMJ.

The study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine(2004;164:305-12), showed that inappropriate prescribing occurred in 16.7 million doctor visits in 2000, with patients getting at least …